![]() At the time, it would take about five minutes to download the 350 KB of data - important for the dial-up modems of the time. “In 1999 when we started, we sized our data chunks that we were sending to people to be about the size that you could do in a reasonable amount of time on a home computer - a reasonable amount of time being a week,” said Korpela. ![]() ![]() On top of all that, there’s interference from Earthling-made objects, like satellites and cell phones. “You have to take into account that half the time the signals are going to be visible, and you have to account for the orbital and the rotational motions of that planet,” he said. If the extraterrestrials are on a planet, then the signal will get blocked as it rotates. The signal might be a single, long tone, like a whistle, or come in pulses. “For your signal to rise above the background noise, you either compress it into a narrow frequency band or compress it in time,” said Korpela. Look again several months later, and it’s still there, in the same spot. Searching for extraterrestrial intelligence involves looking at a spot in the sky and seeing a signal. After a couple of months, there were over a million. Within the first week, nearly 300,000 computers were processing data from the Arecibo Observatory. “He figured that if we could get 10,000 people to donate their computer time, we could do a much better job of analyzing data,” said Korpela. Visualizing Gedye, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley in the mid-1990s, came up the original idea for the project.
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